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Category Archives: Bdsm illustrations

I’ve been looking at the work of the two leading male bdsm graphic artists: Guido Crepax and Milo Manara. The other artist I’d say is really important and really good is Paula Meadows, whose work looks a little more amateurish and folksy, but it’s done with real conviction. But I’ll write about Paula Meadows (whose work comes out under a variety of names) in a post all to herself.

Here’s a Guido Crepax page. It’s a whipping scene from his comic book adaptation of Sade’s Justine. Note the really interesting frame layout, and the telling use of erotic details: the eyes and mouths of Justine’s tormentors, the little dance with her feet when the whip lands, the instant on the whip’s landing across her bottom, and the energy of the whip and the man wielding it.

This is one of his heroine’s, I think Valentina. There’s something about her look that reminds me of French films from the 1960s, Jean-Luc Godard, say.

So we get the Louise Brooks pageboy hairdo, the sullen mouth, small breasts, very skinny arms. Also, the Valentina books resemble 60s French art films because there’s a lot of casual dipping in and out of surrealism, and the plots never make a lot of sense.

Though I’d rather read Crepax than watch a Jean-Luc Godard movie any day. The cinema of “the novelty of boredom” outstayed its welcome after about five minutes.

Took a woman to a Godard retrospective at the local Film Society few years back. Worst date evah. Not her fault. Not really mine. Godard’s. What a wanker. But I digress.

His work is very stylish, and his lines are very elegant. On the other hand, the women he draws tend to be like Vogue models, being extremely slender, sometimes bordering on emaciated. His women look beautiful, but you know that if you took one out for dinner she’d spend ages chewing one lettuce leaf and toying with the same glass of mineral water all night. So, enjoyably perverse though his female characters may be, they probably wouldn’t be a fun date.

That’s a pretty shallow response to art, of course, but it is meant to be sexy. So, his work is very elegant, but a little bit cold.

Milo Manara, on the other hand, draws women who look like sensual women who like food and fucking, and are also enjoyably perverse. If it were me, I’d prefer to go out with a Milo Manara woman. Here’s a Manara post-whipping scene.

You don’t get the interesting lay-out that Guido Crepax gives us. But the woman, freshly whipped and posing for her portrait with welts, has a fleshly quality, a kind of exuberant sexiness. She’s slender, but not starved. Her left breast is just visible, and it seems to be in a world where the body has real three-dimensional properties like weight.

The set-up, “You must be whipped so I can paint you”, is nicely perverse.

Here’s a slightly silly, cartoonish, girl on girl spanking. With an audience. It’s clear, which is never quite clear in a Crepax frame, that the two women are enjoying themselves, both spanker and spankee.

The woman on top, facing us while she spanks her not-very-helpless victim/lover, has breasts that would never appear in a 1960s French art film or a Guido Crepax drawing. The hair in Manara art is more Gina Lollobrigida or Sophia Loren than French chic.

It gets mussed up, and sweaty.

Look, I think Crepax is a better artist, objectively. But here’s a last Manara panel, demonstrating why I prefer his work. You get curves with your collar. And freckles!

These are the top two shelves of the (mostly) bdsm bookcase. It starts with Taschen reprints of Eric Stanton femdom fantasies. And a shiny gold book of historical erotic photos, most of which don’t have any bdsm relevance, but it’s there to be with the rest of the Taschen books. There’s safety in numbers. As the mathematicians say.

Then Sade, Sacher-Masoch, “Walter” and his secret life (I’ve read it all, so you don’t have to: god, that man was a terrible writer), then various books of Victorian porn, and a few samples from pre-Victorian times.

The next two shelves are mostly 20th century bdsm erotica, plus two of the 50 Shades books, which I picked up off the free book exchange table at the local rail station. Plus a few non-fiction books. The wiry brass couple fucking on the upper shelf are from Mali. And the stocky fellow with a thick (but short) erection on the lower shelf is a piece of Saami art, from Lappland.

These are the two bottom shelves. On the left of the upper of these two shelves, there’s one of the very few actually valuable books or series I own. Those three volumes are the bibliographies of Henry Ashbee, possibly better known as Pisanis Fraxi. The Index Liber Prohibitorium, or Index of ForbiddenBooks, and its two successors. First editions, from Victorian times.

The very bottom shelf has various books of erotic art, including bdsm art, like the works of Guido Crepax and Milo Manara.

The thing with a Playboy Bunny Symbol is the complete set of Playboy from the 1950s, on CD-ROM. I’d get the collection for the 1960s as well, but I’ve never seen it in this format. I wouldn’t bother with the 1970s, though Robert Anton Wilson was still editing and writing there at the time. But it was an important and stylish literary mag, for a while.

The duck? He’s a reed duck decoy, First Nation art from the Canadian prairies. He’s got no business being there amongst the sex books in particular. But the duck, he just wanted to be there. Maybe he’s a mallard: they – unlike most other birds – actually have a penis.

And you need a duck, don’t you, if you want to write a rhyming poem about sex.

I was walkin’ down the road an I met a little duck.

He said, “How are ya, human, you look down on your luck?”

I said,”I saw that sexy Sally, tried to slip my nip inside her tuck;

She told me nobody loves me an I’ll never get a -” And so on.

Anyway, that’s the Concavity of Depravity, where Cinderella posed, waiting for her Prince. (Who did come.)

UPDATE:

Cinderella has naming rights, for various reasons. She tells me the whole room is the Library of Depravity, and only the sex books section is the Concavity of Depravity. That seems fine to me.

This is the sex alcove in my library. It’s been named (not by me) the Concavity of Depravity. I like it, though, so it’s become my name for the whole damn library.

Five cases of books about fucking. The case at the left, in the front, is for the pioneering sexologists: the complete works of Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, Havelock Ellis, whatever I’ve been able to get of Magnus Hirschfeld, Ivan Bloch and others. Plus Shere Hite, the legendary Juliet Richters of the Australian Survey on Health and Relationships (ASHR), and various others.

That long white object on the middle shelf of that bookcase is a whalebone dildo, which is probably Indonesian in origin, and was used for pleasure and (the head is relatively small) apparently to instruct young brides-to-be on their marital duties.

The case at the front right is devoted to less pleasant topics, like diseases, rape in the family, in the community and in prison, sexual abuse of children, and other horrible things.

The case on the inside left is for historical books – Aretino, Aristotle’s Masterpiece, the Memoirs of Casanova, and other good things. Also, sex work now and in the past. And pro-sex feminism, i.e. people like Lynn Segal.

At the back, shining in the light, is the (mostly) bdsm bookcase. We’ll come back to that, on Thursday.

And the inside right bookcase, which is barely visible, contains people writing Theory (i.e. late 20th century pomo wankery) about sex and gender. And writing by anti-sex feminists, glowering across at their pro-sex counterparts in the left book case.

I’m writing about the pictures I put up in this blog and how I choose them. I’ve already mentioned some of the principles I apply when I’m searching for and selecting pictures. For example, the picture should illustrate the story, it should suit the real woman the story is about, and it should avoid being too fake, in the cliched porn sense.

5 Decorativeness

Generally, although those principles come first, I also want the picture to look good. A few of the pictures I posted on this blog are there purely because I thought they’re sexy and beautiful. For example, this one: a girl in fluffy angel wings, wiggling her twat at the camera. She has a beautiful smile, too.

One thing running a picture like that can do is teach me humility. This is a writer’s blog. It’s got wordy word words all over it. Except for that post, where my text is only three words long. Have a lookhere.

The thing is, it’s still one of my most popular, most clicked-on posts ever. My contribution may be three fantastically well-chosen words, but I don’t think I can claim the credit for that post’s popularity. Take a bow, Miss Who-ever-you-are. Oh. You sort of already are.

And there’s this picture, that I ran in one of my earliest posts. It’s a very beautiful, very tender image, those breasts touching, softness melting into softness, with the sensitive nipples alerting and getting harder in the middle of it all.

Doesn’t it make you want to be there? I made up some excuse to run the picture, but the real reason was simply that I thought it was – awwwwwww! – lovely.

You can see a bigger version of the pic, and the context I invented so I could run it,here.

6 Generosity

This blog has run pictures of naked guys, a nun whipping herself and a mermaid being – improbably when you think about it – fucked up the ass. I’m not sexually interested in guys, nuns or mermaids, but I assume that some of you are, out there. There’s no reason always to restrict myself to images that I respond to.

So here, in that ecumenical, reach-out spirit, we have a pic of a hentai furry cat-girl and some human guy getting it on.

It’s kind of pretty, but it’s not really my thing. But on the other hand: a warm welcome to furry fans everywhere, and I hope you stick with the blog!

Sometimes the story makes it clear, at least to me, what the picture should show. Let’s say the story has got to the point where the heroine is kneeling, at the top of a staircase, giving head to the anti-hero (that’s me). She has her hands tied behind her back. Also, she’s dyed some but not all of her hair blue, and she has a huge tattoo on her lower belly. She has fresh cane stripes across her arse.

If you’re a regular reader, you’ll have recognised Raylene from that description. And perhaps you wondered if you missed an episode, because that hasn’t happened in the story so far. It’s something that happened a couple of months after the day I’ve been talking about. I’ll probably tell how that came to be, and what it meant, later.

But my chances of finding a picture that comes even close to illustrating that are pretty small. The blue hair and tattoo will have to go, for starters: too much to hope for. I’ll probably have to forget about finding a photo with stairs in it.

I’m going searching now.

This one loses the blue hair and the tattoo, and it’s nowhere near any stairs, though at least it has a bedroom setting. It’s obviously a hotel room, which is wrong for the feel entirely.

But at least this girl has her hands tied behind her back, and she’s giving head, and she may not have cane marks, but the thing round her neck at least gives it a bdsm ambience.

But it’s completely wrong for Raylene. Even in old jeans and a holey jersey she had far more style than that. And she would never, ever, not in this millennium or the next wear nothing but high heels, or wear high heels for sex.

Maybe no-one else cares, but I imagine Raylene’s disgust at the girl’s hair and heels, and I realise I’d be insulting her if I used that pic to represent her.

So I keep on searching. I have to reject several pics because they’re all about huge cock pride first, and the woman only second, and that’s not what I’m thinking of either.

So in the end, out of desperation I pick this one, because at least the woman’s hair is dark and straight, which Raylene’s was where it wasn’t blue. This girl may be Japanese, but she looks more like Raylene than the other girl.

And she’s not using her hands, which is important. I tied Raylene’s hands exactly because it made her task more difficult and forced her to work harder.

So the pic illustrates almost nothing I set out to capture. But the search took me hours, and this was still the best I could do.

A reader commented that my gratuitous damn pictures aren’t safe for work. I don’t think she was seriously complaining; it was just that a pic of a pretty girl having a shower had popped up on my blog, and on her computer screen, just as her tutor was looking over her shoulder. And so she was outed as a reader of mildly kinky erotica.

Anyway, I said I’d explain the rationale behind my use of illustrations. So here goes…

1 Resemblance

The first thing is that all of the stories I tell here are true, except where I’ve indicated otherwise.

Nice little kilt, cute socks. But paddling should only happen to someone who has the right to choose not to be in a relationship in which she gets her ass paddled. So I’ll never paddle a real schoolgirl: only fake ones.

I wrote a “spanked schoolgirl” story for a woman who really liked that story-universe. But I’ve never spanked a schoolgirl. Never would. An adult woman in a little kilt is a different question. And in a recent story I borrowed an incident that’d happened with a different woman, and moved it into the story I was telling at the time. I think those are the only exceptions.

Qing is a real person, and so is Raylene. And so is Senimelia, Ana, Sa’afia, and so on. However, I’ve changed their names and anything else that might be an identifying piece of information, and I’m not going to use a real photo of them.

I look for photos that capture something of the way they looked, at least to me, but that are also different enough to misdirect anyone who actually happens to know the people concerned. I don’t quite know why I try for that kind of resemblance. It just feels right. But it can take hours, by the way.

2 “Realness”

Yeah, I know: “Like, what is Real?” asked Jesting Pilate. “What’s that even mean?”

A picture otherwise unlikely to appear on this blog

I know that the women who work in mainstream porn are “real” people, and I don’t mean any disrespect to them. But I tend to avoid pictures of bodies that are too sculptured or fake tanned, and I’m put off by pictures that include breasts, eyes and mouths that look like they’ve had what’s called “work”.

I prefer pictures – and women, in real life – who look “natural”. I know that straight men underestimate how much make-up it sometimes takes to make a woman look like she isn’t wearing make-up. I know that “real”, “natural”, and their opposites, don’t mean as much as we like to think. And “looks natural” means something very different from “natural”.

“Natural” is too hard to define, or recognise. That’s why I wrote “looks natural”.

Still, I tend to fancy a woman who works at a bookshop I drop in at, or who is doing check-out at a supermarket, or is just strolling down the street, much more than I fancy most porn stars. They seem more “real”. So the pictures I choose reflect that. Not out of policy; to me they just look better.

3 The porn star gurn

Demonstrating the porn star gurn: she may also make dry moan and say, “yes, yes, yes!”

I know lesbians – well, bi girls, mostly – who find girl-on-girl porn made for men depressing because the girls’ cunts are dry: they may have a lubrication glaze, but they are obviously not turned on. An equivalent is the face a bored model pulls to show she’s in the throes of sexual ecstasy.

Even if she’s an attractive woman, the porn star gurn shows that she’s not interested, which is a turn-off. And she thinks her audience is so stupid that they won’t know, which is an additional turn-off.

Anyway, I try to keep gurning, sex-related or otherwise, out of this blog’s Magic Toyshop of images.

Demonstrating the non-porn gurn

“Gurning”, by the way, is an Irish term that means pulling an extreme face to make the gurner’s head look very, very weird. It’s a kind of transformation that the heroes do, on a bigger scale, in many Gaelic epics. Anyway, gurning is a thing. They have competitions for it.

I don’t how long other people take to select photos. Anyway, I’m out of time for this post, but have more to say about images. So I’ll continue this tomorrow.

By the way, I had a great-uncle who used to go in for gurning competitions in the pub in his town, which had a lot of ex-patriate Irish. He won certificates for it, which was honourable if not profitable. To give a better idea of the type of guy he was, he also used to say: “Have a Great Day! Day, not Dane. Jesussss…” This will be his only mention in this blog.

There are things I could write about this, about how people take corporate-owned images and characters and turn them to their own meanings and uses. And how excellent that is, even when the art-work is amateurish, or the politics of the new meaning is as dodgy as the corporate stuff.

This one has better art than usual, and that’s all I’m going to say, today.

I’m going to be busy for a few days. There’ll still be a post a day, I hope, but it wouldn’t be very wordy.

http://arkspaddedroom.tumblr.com Unfortunately, it’s neither erotic nor funny, but at least it takes on legendary characters and gives them a new meaning. I like that.

I worked too many hours today, and now I’m off to dinner. With colleagues. I’d be mildly surprised if I don’t have the fourth glass of wine, which is that vital one too many.

So I don’t have much time for writing words. Instead, here’s a “Doctor Who spanking cartoon”. I googled the last four words of that last sentence at random, because I’m not feeling very thoughtful. But I knew the internet wouldn’t let me down.

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